Colin said nothing. These were the statements you just left there, taking up space.
She went quiet for a period longer.
Then she said, “No. The only thing that would make me kill you is if I thought you would hurt us.”
Us. Colin squeezed his eyes shut against the dark and tried to force away the image of him hurting his wife and unborn child.
“If I thought you would hurt us, and leaving you wouldn’t stop you, then, I think. Then I could kill you. Make a plan. Carry it out.”
He couldn’t remain silent any longer. “That’s awful.”
“I know,” she said. “But you did ask.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“So you think he was hurting her?”
Colin had asked himself that same question many times over.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “There weren’t any signs of it from Cooper’s report, and he would’ve noticed anything obvious.”
“But everyone is different,” Meg added. “Not all women are the same, you know.”
“I know.”
“Maybe she has a threshold that’s lower than mine. But I still don’t think she did it.”
He turned to her, though she couldn’t see him. “Because you can’t figure out motive?”
“Maybe,” Meg said. “But she’s also a writer. Her book seems so…well researched. Organized.”
“So what, then?”
“I don’t know. It’s like…somebody capable of writing multiple books is too sound of mind to commit homicide.”
Meg was a helluva lot smarter than that, Colin knew. Maybe she just had some kind of soft spot for the Yates woman, he thought.
“Or just the opposite,” he said. “Maybe she knows a lot about killing because of what she writes. And maybe she writes what she does because she has a dark part of her trying to get out. You ever heard of Clara Tomson?”
“No.”
“She’s a writer,” he said. “Has over thirty books or so, mysteries. Lots of them bestsellers.”
“And?”
Colin thought about the articles he found on Clara Tomson after doing a simple Google search querying writers who have killed people.
“Formerly known as Elsa Holm. When she was sixteen, she and her boyfriend killed Clara’s father. Stabbed him while he was sleeping.”
“God. She must have written those books from prison.”
“Nope. She went to prison, but only for about three years, over in Sweden.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“Clara claimed the father was abusive. Maybe he was. Her mother denied it, as did her brother.”
“Spousal denials are common.”
“Yes, they are,” Colin said. “Anyway, justified homicide or not, Clara did her time and now writes mystery novels. I think she’s in her eighties now.”
“So she writes about murder?”
“I haven’t read her books, but yeah, I assume so. Wouldn’t be a mystery novel without a corpse, I’d think.”
He felt Meg shift in the bed, and her toes touched his.
“So are you extrapolating this Tomson’s life onto the Yates woman? You think she writes what she does because she has some dark past?”
He had never formed those exact words in his head, but now that Meg had suggested it, Colin wondered if there was some truth to the idea.
“I’m not extrapolating anything,” he said, stifling a yawn. “I’m just saying there might be a reason J. L. Sharp is good at writing books about violent crime.”
Meg offered a hmm and nothing more. A few minutes passed in silence, and then Colin heard the slow and steady breaths of his sleeping wife. Sleep came easy for her, always had. But Colin’s mind still churned with thoughts of Rose Yates and what might or might not have happened in that Milwaukee apartment on the night of July seventh.
As he turned to the side, gathered the pillow up in a ball beneath his head, and tried to fall asleep himself, Colin couldn’t keep four words from looping in his mind. That old phrase from decades past, a basic piece of advice for authors.
Write what you know.
Twenty-One
Bury, New Hampshire
October 15
My editor is pissed.
I’m hunched over the laptop at the kitchen table, reading her response to my email requesting a change to the manuscript.
Rose—
As I told you very clearly, the last round of edits were the final edits. We can’t make changes at this point unless they are obvious typos, etc. Certainly not the scope you are talking about. Even if we could, I wouldn’t want you to change the death scene on the stairs, as it’s a powerful, impactful scene. As you know, the galleys are already out and we’ll be getting trade reviews in about a month. I hate to say it, but we simply cannot accommodate your request.
Best,
Nancy
Shit.
When Cora freaked out about the scene in the book, I admit it rattled me. Made me second-guess the idea of it all. But after my father insisted I have the scene changed or removed altogether, I outright panicked. That night, I went back and read the chapter from a viewpoint of paranoia and suspicion and concluded Oh my god, what have I done?
My father was right. I need to change this, but I can’t do it on my own.
I write back.
Nancy,
I understand and it’s difficult for me to explain my reasoning other than I’m fully convinced the scene doesn’t work as is. I want to change the method in which the character dies and the character’s name as well. I really hate the name Corey Brownstein and don’t know why I used it initially. I’d like to use the name John Simms instead. I think it works much better, and just changing the name should be an easy fix. Let me know if at least this is possible, and thank you.
Rose
I’ve done enough police-procedural research to know many murders are never solved, and once a crime is in cold-case status, there’s almost no hope of solving it unless new technology exposes a previously hidden clue or the killer makes a deathbed or prison-cell confession. If a murder has gone unsolved for twenty years, the killer (or killers) should have a high degree of confidence of never being caught, especially if that murder was the only one they
